Like the leaders of other western governments, Keir Starmer has announced that the UK government is considering recognising Palestine as a state. The appalling policy of the Israeli government, deliberately starving the population of Gaza in full view of the world’s media, had left Starmer no choice. But at best, his announcement is a half-hearted token measure, designed only to muffle the growing howls of protest, some even from his own MPs, over the genocide in Gaza.
Israel’s man-made Gaza famine is causing even some of Netanyahu’s stoutest defenders to shift uncomfortably in their seats. It could not be otherwise, given the constant stream of harrowing news and pictures coming out of Gaza. There are still some political commentators, however, who deny – despite the photographs of emaciated children and the assessments of the entirety of the world’s humanitarian and welfare agencies – that there is “no famine” in Gaza. So says the new Israeli government spokesperson, David Mencer, who just happened to be David Lammy’s campaign organiser in his bid to become London mayor.
It has come too late for the 60,000 killed (official figures, likely to be higher in reality) in Gaza, but much of the political and diplomatic support Israel has retained among western politicians is ebbing away. That is not because the political representatives of capitalism have had a severe attack of conscience, but because the massive shifts of popular opinion, the ongoing protests, and, not least, the images coming out of Gaza are forcing them to change tack.
The reputation of the state of Israel is in the gutter. It is a pariah state, and there are only a few on the right wing of politics who still openly support Israel’s policy towards Palestine. Even Donald Trump has bluntly said that people are suffering in Gaza. The starvation, he said, “can’t be faked”.
Starmer is far behind even ‘liberal’ opinin in Israel
Across the world, Israel has become a by-word for cruelty and barbarity. According to the US polling organisation, Pew, “In 20 of the 24 countries surveyed, around half of adults or more have an unfavorable view of Israel. Around three-quarters or more hold this view in Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Turkey”.
This is a significant change of sentiments in the past, and for obvious reasons and it is only the political representatives of capitalism and the establishment in the west who are hanging on for dear life to their support for Israel.
Typical of the right-wing of the Labour Party, the leadership around Keir Starmer is far behind even ‘liberal’ opinion in Israel, where words like ‘apartheid’ have been used for years to describe government policy towards Palestinians, and where the word ‘genocide’ has been penned by journalists and human rights organisers for months.
It is in this context that Keir Starmer has now said that the government might recognise a Palestinian state. Yet in his email to Labour members about Gaza, Starmer shows that although he is squirming in the face of undeniable cruelty and war crimes, he still sits firmly under the thumb of the pro-Israeli lobby.
“Right now, in Gaza”, he writes, “we are seeing horrifying images that will stay with us for a lifetime. Starving babies. Children too weak to stand. All because of a catastrophic failure of aid”. Starmer knows full well that it isn’t a case of a “failure of aid”, but a deliberate and calculated withholding of aid, including food, water and medical supplies and for him not to say to say that outright is a disgrace.
Tonnes of aid is available within a few miles of those hundreds of thousands who need it and it is the Israeli government, which funds lobbyists to finance the offices of Labour MPs, which is preventing that aid from moving.
Starmer also writes that “Palestinian statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people”. Then why, we might ask, is the Palestinian state not recognised now? Why is it that the UK is only (in his words) “on a pathway” to recognise Palestine? Even now, with the most disturbing pictures coming out of Gaza, Starmer is putting qualifications to recognition of Palestine.
Starmer’s is a strategy to avoid complicity in genocide
The Israeli government, with a Prime Minister whose every utterance is a lie, is expert at obfuscation and prevarication. In suggesting that Britain will recognise Palestine in two months’ time, “unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza”, Starmer is throwing a life-line to the war criminal Netanyahu.
“I’m under intense pressure, Bibi”, we can imagine Starmer saying, “please take some token action to get me off the hook here”. Perhaps Bibi will make some small gesture, enough for Starmer to have the excuse to postpone doing – yet again – something that was in Labour’s manifesto.
This decision, to ‘threaten’ recognition of Israel, is at attempt by Keir Starmer and the likes of Foreign Minister, David Lammy, to avoid complicity in the war crimes perpetrated in Gaza. The British government has been providing arms to Israel throughout the whole of the one-sided onslaught against the people of Gaza. Even while tens of thousands were being killed – overwhelmingly women and children – the UK was a sending trade delegation to Israel.
Starmer, like the Labour Friends of Israel, holds on to a “two-state” solution only as a political fig-leaf. Labour’s right-wing and all the Labour Friends of Netanyahu know perfectly well that Israeli policy for decades has undermined – and we might now say, virtually eliminated – the possibility of a two-state solution. And by their silence, Labour’s right-wing have been complicit in the entrenchment of Israel’s apartheid state, in the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and now in the genocide in Gaza.
Some Israelis demand “crippling sanctions”
While Starmer is sending mealy-mouthed emails to Labour members, thirty-one Israelis, including academics and others from the world of cinema and the arts, were writing to the Guardian in a far more strident and demanding manner.
“We, Israelis” they wrote, “…write this with grave shame, in rage and in agony. Our country is starving the people of Gaza to death and contemplating the forced removal of millions of Palestinians from the Strip. The international community must impose crippling sanctions on Israel until it ends this brutal campaign and implements a permanent ceasefire”.
Three weeks ago, the conference of Unite urged its members and branches “to take part in divestment campaigns targeting local government pension funds and council investments in companies complicit in Israel’s war crimes”. That should be the policy of the labour movement today – full support for boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions, not insincere crocodile tears over Palestinian suffering.
[Feature picture: Keir Starmer on the phone to Benjamin Netanyahu. From Wikimedia Commons, here]
